There are cigars and brandy, chintz armchairs and fine china. Marlowe is sitting in the offices of a fancy country-club. Humphrey Bogart as Phillip Marlowe in The Big Sleepīanville himself is certainly aware of the hold that film has on the literary characters and early in the book he gives a winking nod to Bogart. Sure enough there was a role for all the usual suspects: there is a creepy, effeminate Peter Lorre type, an enormous, gang-lord Sydney Greenstreet, a fetching Lauren Bacall character, and, of course, there is Bogart as Marlowe. So pervasive are the film renditions of Chandler’s L.A., that I found myself casting the characters while reading The Black-Eyed Blonde. Dick Powell and Robert Mitchum both played Marlowe, and successfully, but undoubtedly, the most iconic incarnation of Phillip Marlowe is that played by Humphrey Bogart. There have been several television series featuring the L.A. While Chandler’s fiction is read and esteemed, and his influence on detective fiction in particular and American literature in general widely acknowledged, his detective’s presence is mostly ingrained in the American consciousness through film and television.

With The Black-Eyed Blonde, however, Banville decided to try something new: to write a novel using Raymond Chandler’s most famous private detective, Philip Marlowe. Like his “literary novels,” these crime novels are psychologically astute, intensely plotted, and keenly aware of language. In 2006, with the release of Christine Falls, the Booker-Prize-winning novelist John Banville began publishing “crime fiction” under the pen name Benjamin Black.

The black eyed blonde